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The title track on “Everybody Scream,” the new album by Florence and the Machine, opens with a synth organ layered over an eerie choral harmony. In the video, directed by Autumn de Wilde, Florence Welch stands on a low stage in a sixteenth-century manor house with a crowd of people—old men in suits, women in black gowns—convulsing around her, as if she is leading a mass exorcism. A coven of witches in white blouses and long skirts leap onto tables, eyes bulging and teeth bared. Welch, who is wearing a crimson-red dress and matching heels, spits flowers onto a man as she writhes over him. Somehow, it works.

Known for her red hair, bohemian dress, and pagan-inspired lyrics, Welch has brought gothic fanfare to pop music for nearly two decades. In her songs, she regularly communes with demons, ghosts, and devils. She has described her live performances as an “agnostic church.” Her voice is her most powerful weapon, sonorous and ethereal as she dances around cavernous stages. For her previous album, “Dance Fever,” she drew inspiration from Pre-Raphaelite art, medieval choreomania, and the stories of Carmen Maria Machado, crafting a world of bittersweet enchantment. But if her last record was a fairy tale, she told KROQ, “This one’s just a horror film.”

During the songwriting process, she steeped herself in the horror canon, studying occultism at the Warburg Institute and reading books such as Rob Young’s “Electric Eden,” which traces how British folk music in the sixties and seventies began to cross over with mysticism. “Doing the work and sleeping alone / downloading Revelations of Divine Love on my phone,” she sings wryly, on “Perfume and Milk.” There was an endearing camp to the rollout of “Everyone Scream,” which was released on Halloween: the teaser trailer, which was also directed by de Wilde, shows Welch yelling like a final girl into a deep hole. She even took screaming lessons to prepare. Welch has always brought musical-theatre instincts to her work, but these witchy references feel particularly well suited to an album that charts the sacrifices that she has made to have her work taken seriously. “Here I don’t have to be quiet / Here I don’t have to be kind, extraordinary, normal all at the same time,” Welch sings, of the power she finds while performing, on “Everybody Scream.” “But look at me run myself ragged, blood on the stage / But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?”

On “One of the Greats,” which Welch wrote while touring “Dance Fever,” we find the artist recovering from the sort of electric performance described in the opening track. She imagines herself buried underground and then raised back to life to keep making music. It may be one of Welch’s best songs in years—the kind of glorious slow burn on which she made her name. She recorded it in a single, six-minute take, with Mark Bowen, of the band Idles; during production, Ethel Cain added backing vocals. (Welch’s other collaborators on the album include Mitski and Aaron Dessner, of the National.) She sings about being burnt out, at only thirty-six:

I did my best, tried to impress

my childhood dream made flesh

and my dresses and my flowering sadness

so like a woman to profit from her madnesses

Her music has often reckoned with pursuing fame and artistry in the face of mediocre men who hold her back, but rarely has she been as confrontational as she is here: “It must be nice to be a man / and make boring music just because you can,” she coos. The music video is a single shot of Welch in the back of a car, singing along in a suit, sporting shades and a cigar, both mocking and inhabiting the position of male dominance. “You’ll bury me again, you’ll say it’s all pretend / That I could never be great being held up against such male tastes,” she sings. Welch is more than just a singer. Like many female musicians, the craft of her songwriting and the many instruments she plays are often left out of the conversation. “People often care a lot less about, like, how women make music,” she said in a recent interview. “The personal is always first. People don’t often ask the technical questions.”

As with her past work, this album draws some of its force from the friction of romance, but the central conflict on “Everybody Scream” is between Welch and her own ambition. She’s often struggling to decide what she’s willing to give up in order to have a stable life. There is nowhere that she feels more alive than on the stage, but, six albums in, the costs begin to mount. On “Music by Men,” a soft, whispery folk song, she sings about going to couple’s therapy with a boyfriend. (Welch’s current partner, whose name she keeps private, is a guitarist in a British indie band.) She picks at the man’s hair, at his “stupid band T-shirt,” and notices that, as they each listen separately to their own demos on the ride home, she slides down in her seat so as not to threaten him. She knows that, for men, ambition is rarely sexy in a woman. But the song also shows her fighting to find compromise, and to resist the urge to run away from his love. The balance between these two types of companionship—between her and her partner, and between her and the stage—is difficult to maintain. She pleads:

Let it be us

Let it be home

Let it not be a spotlight

standing alone

running back to the only love

I could ever control

The horror at the heart of “Everybody Scream” is deeply autobiographical. In 2023, not long after the release of “Dance Fever,” Welch, who was pregnant, arrived at a concert in Cornwall feeling ill and bleeding heavily. She popped an ibuprofen and performed anyway, but when she got back to London, her doctor discovered that she had been carrying an ectopic pregnancy, and that her fallopian tube had burst, filling her abdomen with blood. She was rushed into emergency surgery. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she told the Guardian. Only ten days later, she was touring again.

Welch’s songs have often channelled the tempest of her desires, and the intermingling of birth, life, sex, and death. She has written a great deal about her struggles with anorexia, alcoholism, and anxiety. But on her new album the spectre of the miscarriage forces her to reckon with her femininity—what it gives and what it takes—in a new way. Violence arises from a different kind of performance. “Sometimes my body feels so alien to me,” she sings on “Kraken,” a song in which she imagines herself as a literal monster of fame. In an interview with Radio X, she explained that, in the past, she had always felt like gender was something that was put on her. “I actually felt like performance and art liberated me from my gender,” she said. “Then, when I was just thinking about trying to have a family, it just kind of came to get me.” On “Sympathy Magic,” she conjures an image of herself crushed in a ballgown, as if she’s caught in a trap of her own womanhood. “I no longer try to be good / It didn’t keep me safe like you said / that it would,” she sings, before blaring synths carry her voice high above the void.

The ghost of a child haunts the album, particularly on the penultimate track, “You Can Have It All.” “I used to think I knew what sadness was / I was wrong,” she sings. “A piece of flesh / A million pounds / Am I a woman now?” The song hums with restless potential until it explodes in a raucous chorus, guitars chugging and strings whining. There’s a clipped, breathless quality in her voice, a pervasive sense of anxiety, as if the near-death experience has unlocked something in her throat. Even the title track doesn’t surge with the same certainty as her old hits. These new songs don’t ripple with doubt but with fear and fury.

The final song on the album, “And Love,” is a siren song, a lilting coda that trades in bombastic choruses for a softer palette, not unlike 2018’s “The End of Love.” A quiet piano rolls along with a harp and simple synths. Here, at last, Welch seems to find her own version of compromise.

And love was not what I thought it was

More like an animal crawling deep into a cave

Than a romance-novel heroine getting swept away

More like surrendering to something

And more like resting than running

It concludes in the present tense, with Welch repeating “Peace is coming” like an incantation. This is a calmer version of the artist than we’re used to hearing, outlining what love is through what it is not. Only a few songs earlier, she pleads, “Let me put out a record and not have it ruin my life.” This time, though, perhaps, there’s nothing to run from. “And Love” offers a vision of Welch’s future—a place where she can lie down and enjoy the fruits of her labor. It’s not an ending, it’s an interlude. ♦

What’s the point of talking pictures if the people in them don’t talk? The characters in Ira Sachs’s films always express themselves volubly, even when there’s plenty of action (rewatch the ardently kinetic “Passages”), but in his surprising and boldly imaginative new drama, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” talk becomes the action. It’s a bio-pic, of sorts, about the photographer of the title (played by Ben Whishaw), who, on December 19, 1974, was interviewed by the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), at her apartment, on the Upper East Side. Rosenkrantz was planning a book about how artists spend their time and asked Hujar to recount, in detail, what he’d done the previous day, from the time he woke up until the time he went to sleep. Eventually, Rosenkrantz abandoned her project, and the tape of the interview was lost, but, in 2019, a transcript turned up at the Morgan Library, where Hujar’s archives are held. It was published by Magic Hour Press in 2021, and that text is, for the most part, the script for Sachs’s film.

The day that Hujar described to Rosenkrantz, December 18th, was a busy one. It started with a phone call from an editor, another from Susan Sontag, and the editor’s visit to Hujar’s loft, on East Twelfth Street and Second Avenue. There was a trip to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment, a few blocks away, to photograph him for the Times; a bunch of telephone calls, a visit from the writer Glenn O’Brien, a dinner with Vince Aletti (a contributor to this magazine) and a walk to get takeout for it; finally, a long evening working in his darkroom to develop and print photos, including the ones he’d just taken of Ginsberg.

In the interview, Hujar doesn’t merely itemize this whirl of activity but gives it dramatic urgency, psychological weight, and social scope by delving into the personal connections and backstories—the fundamentals of career, friendship, pleasure, and money—that underlie the day’s events. The result is an exalted transfiguration of uninhibited gossip, breezy but earnest, carefree and provocative. Hujar sends forth a parade of names: along with Sontag and Ginsberg, he discusses William S. Burroughs (scurrilously, possibly slanderously) and also mentions Janet Flanner (a longtime writer for this magazine), Lauren Hutton, Fran Lebowitz, and Robert Wilson (all of whom he photographed). Describing a phone call from the painter Ed Baynard, Hujar mocks him as garrulous, calls him “totally insane,” and adds, “If this ever gets printed, I hope it’s printed with his name.” Rosenkrantz mock-indignantly responds, “What do you mean, ‘if’?”

In Sachs’s film, none of Hujar’s busy day is shown onscreen. Instead, Peter and Linda are seen mostly in her apartment, during the interview, talking, talking, and talking, from daytime until twilight. But, though the movie may be all talk, it’s a highly image-centered work nonetheless. Sachs films the pair in a variety of places and postures—sitting face to face in her living room, standing in the kitchen, lying down on her bed. Peter perches on a windowsill, reclines on a sofa, sits at the bench of her piano, paces around, pokes through her books and records, and puts on a 45 (Tennessee Jim’s “Hold Me Tight”) that they dance to. They go out to the terrace and up to the roof, and their enduring friendship, their ease of communication and evident familiarity, gives the gathering a graceful air of complicity, of artistic collaboration.

Rosenkrantz never wrote her book but, in a sense, Sachs completes it for her—not in scope, of course, but in depth. Converting the text of the interview into a movie brings it to life in three distinct ways. The interview’s first cinematic life is the drama onscreen, the depiction of Peter and Linda’s conversation. For Sachs, the talk is more than a meeting of the minds, just as his images are no mere recordings of Whishaw and Hall’s keenly inflected performances. The film’s shots, though deftly unintrusive, are carefully composed to lend conversational moments sculptural weight. Long takes emphasize the mental labor of Hujar’s self-exploration, and Sachs’s framing (with cinematography by Alex Ashe) crowds the pair together to evoke the intimacy of their talk. What’s especially striking is the sparing use of closeups. Sachs presents his characters’ intellect and emotion, their artistic energy, as inseparable from physicality: he avoids the cliché of talking heads and realizes the idea of talking bodies.

The second way that the film brings the interview to life is in the evocation of the day being described. There are no flashbacks or archival clips in “Peter Hujar’s Day,” no images of anyone but Peter and Linda. But the narrative that unfolds conjures imposing images in the mind’s eye; indeed, the movie’s most indelible depictions may be imaginary ones. Peter is a visual thinker, a photographic talker, describing his surroundings with a precise and artistic eye. His account of picking up takeout at a Chinese restaurant gains a mock-epic grandeur from a fine-grained description of another customer, who was drawing on a small piece of paper and whom he saw minutes later, at a convenience store, pen still in hand. This attention to detail means that the narratives of his time with Ginsberg, his dinner with Aletti, his work in the darkroom all create powerful images for the viewer—a visual track parallel to the one onscreen. This procession of imaginary images is rendered all the more dramatic by the psychology underpinning Peter’s monologue: his passionate reflections on his social circles and his world of work, his urgent conception of what he’s trying to achieve with a camera.

The third cinematic life that the film bestows on the interview is the moment of filming. Sachs emphasizes, from the start of the movie, its artifice, exposing the nuts and bolts of its creation; the action begins with a view of the slate used to mark the scene and help synchronize the sound. Shooting on film, rather than digitally, Sachs occasionally retains, in the editing, the untrimmed beginnings and ends from rolls of film. One scene conspicuously features the sound recordist’s microphone boom alongside the slate. The action cuts freely from place to place in the apartment and from pose to pose of its characters, even as the talk unspools uninterrupted. (There are also a few changes of clothing from shot to shot.) These ways of filming and editing build subtle but unmistakable seams into the movie’s texture and push the seams into the foreground. The effect is to pull Rosenkrantz’s interview with Hujar—and indeed the subjects and the people who are discussed—into the present tense.

By making Hujar’s presence so tangible, Sachs calls attention to a cruel absence: the artist died of aids, in 1987, at the age of fifty-three. (Rosenkrantz, born the same year as Hujar, is still alive, at ninety-one.) Hujar’s death is never explicitly referenced, but passages of Mozart’s Requiem on the soundtrack heighten the haunted feel of Sachs’s present tense. “Peter Hujar’s Day” is a requiem for Hujar and for the many other members of the downtown art scene lost to aids, victims not only of the disease but also of the stigmatization and persecution of gay men that shadowed the era. Sachs, without footnoting his movie in any way, evokes this history and Hujar’s place in it. The day that Hujar lived and described, in December, 1974, comes off not as a set of isolated incidents but as across-section, both sociological and novelistic, of an entire world, one that vanished with the early deaths of many of its most vital creators. Hujar’s death was famously commemorated in a photograph taken in the moments after he died by David Wojnarowicz. Sachs’s film is all the greater for not showing this, and for creating a personal work of mourning—not a death mask but a life one. ♦

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Padma Lakshmi is unquestionably a woman of taste. As a host of the beloved food-competition series “Top Chef” and the star of the culinary docuseries “Taste the Nation,” she’s spent nearly two decades artfully conveying—and critiquing—flavors and aromas for an audience. Before that, she was a fashion writer and model, cultivating her own sense of what’s worth wearing and seeing. And she isn’t done evolving: she’s recently begun performing standup comedy, an art form with a notoriously steep learning curve. In a live taping at The New Yorker Festival, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz talk with Lakshmi about the difference between discernment and pickiness, how travel has expanded her taste, and her approach to rendering judgement on TV. “I see my job as helping,” Lakshmi says. “I see my job as being the person in the kitchen who’s saying, ‘Does this need a little salt?’ ”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Top Chef” (2006-)
“Taste the Nation” (2020-23)
“RuPaul’s Drag Race” (2009-)
“American Idol” (2002-)
“Project Runway” (2004-)
“Padma’s All American,” by Padma Lakshmi
“Padma Lakshmi Walks Into a Bar,” by Helen Rosner (The New Yorker)
“Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (The New Yorker)
Dijon’s “Baby”
“Frankenstein” (2025)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker staff writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Democrats’ sweeping victories in the first major elections of Donald Trump’s second term. They talk about what the results—from Zohran Mamdani’s record-turnout win, in New York City, to victories in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races—reveal about Trump’s weakening hold on voters and a generational shift inside the Democratic Party. They also explore how a focus on affordability and economic anxiety fuelled Democrats’ success, and how these outcomes may shape the strategies of both parties heading into next year’s midterms.

This week’s reading:

“A Next-Generation Victory for Democrats,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

“What the Democrats’ Good Night Means for 2026 and Beyond,” by Isaac Chotiner

“California Strikes Back in the Redistricting War,” by Jon Allsop

“The Mamdani Era Begins,” by Eric Lach

“The N.Y.C. Mayoral Election, as Processed in Therapy,” by Tyler Foggatt

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.